Adversary To The Villain

This is clever. The series sets up a typical 'chosen one' story, but in the end, the adversary isn't 'the one' who won because of a prophecy. Instead, they won because they were stubborn, empathetic and refused to give in to easy solutions to deal with their enemy. The villain wasn’t a destined evil that had to be destroyed. Instead, they made terrible choices after being placed in an awful situation. The ending shows how the future is determined by human choice in the face of insurmountable odds, and how there are no destined heroes or villains. The series is a powerful humanist statement, disguised as a typical fantasy story.

Technically speaking, creating a PDF of a web novel would probably be against a site’s Terms of Service. Such content is ‘scraped’ in order to be made available in another format. Of course people do this already, but it’s also a great way to get your account banned should you get caught using specific tools to download large numbers of chapters. Sites are monitored for abnormal download behavior, and users trying to scrape content from their own accounts for their own reasons can be locked out of their own work. It’s all a bit of a moral gray area, but it’s also risky. It’s generally safer to stick to the site’s rules, even if those rules are there to maximize profit.

Villain patrons can be really good listeners. Tony Soprano is a great example of this from The Sopranos. The way he grasps the problems of his crew members and uses them to his advantage is a pretty messed up form of mentorship. The best kind of villain patrons are pragmatic and psychological manipulators. They may grant power to their followers, but they also grant them a sense of belonging. It can be really toxic and the followers will often stay long after it becomes obvious that it’s bad for them.

I felt cheated out of an ending to Rebirth of the Thief Who Sees Through Time. Hundreds of chapters of intrigue and complex magic systems had led me to expect a dramatic and perhaps angst-ridden conclusion but instead it was resolved by a faintly ridiculous ‘death’ that wasn’t even real. A large amount of development had gone into the Crown Prince and the Saintess’s complicated relationship – we’d seen him consider going against his own morals to save her on more than one occasion – and in the end all of that was cut down and ripped away in a few short chapters and conveniently concluded by having him retire to a small cottage in the country to spend the rest of his days in silence, his many decades of plotting and manipulations having no lasting impact on the kingdom. The entire storyline with the ‘demon king’ (in the end it was just a simple grudge that had been festering for years) had been built up over hundreds of chapters, only to be resolved in a handful of scenes of conversation in the final arc, and the chapters that followed were very rushed as the author presumably tired of the story and was meeting a deadline. A quiet ending would have been fine but it would have had to have been more fully fleshed out in order to have made sense – instead it read as lazy. The little bird that flies down at the end of the book? Unearned sentimentality.

'Cloud Sky' by unknown author is the other novel I’ve been reading. It’s a power fantasy from the worst possible angle but it’s written well enough that I won’t list out all the things that the author is avoiding in order to get to the id of his readers and feed it to them without judgment.

I watched the whole series last month and, even though the ending was totally satisfying, it left me feeling kind of empty. Kind of how you feel when a friend of yours has gone through hell to get to a better place and you have to bid them farewell with the hope that they can now relax in a quieter town. You’re happy for them but you’ll miss the struggles that you went through with them. The way the practical plot of the series played out was very satisfying: the system is defeated, the true villain is defeated, Penelope is safe. But the emotional journey that the series took us on is what’s been left with me. The fear that she felt all the time, the constant calculations, her loneliness – all of that has gotten under my skin. And the ending is quiet and doesn’t even attempt to drown you in a celebration of her. It just makes you sit with her and the weight of her journey. Effective, I suppose, but not really “fun” to watch in the classical sense.

Honestly? This is a divisive book. After so much intense and thrilling cat-and-mouse games between our hero and villain, it does not end with them in love. It does not even end with them together. The end of the story is that the villain wins in some way, specifically that they reject the entire game of hero and villain. They use the hero’s greatest weakness (their obsessive nature) to expose the hero to the public and bring down their authority. We last see the villain on a train, looking out at the unfamiliar scenery of another place, shadowless. It’s a bittersweet but very much open-ended ending. It’s not about them. It’s about him/her. And it’s very freeing. I didn’t want more from this book. I thought that was the perfect ending to it. Many others will disagree with me, though.